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When I was in elementary and middle school in Virginia in the 1970s, we learned about the Civil War from many sources, including battlefield visits. The title of one book has stay with me, because Across Five Aprils  is a very handy mnemonic for the dates that bracket this horrible rift, from Fort Sumter to the Appomattox Court House: April 22, 1861 to April 9, 1865. In many ways, of course, the war never ended. I first learned of the war through a southern lens, but neither my teachers nor my community embraced the Lost Cause continuation of the conflict, as I later learned many thousands still do. Even where I live today, in a part of Massachusetts where nearly every town boasts a Union Street and an honor roll of those who defended the United States against its most serious (to date) insurgency, the Confederate Battle flag sometimes flies ... and more so since the 2016 ascendency of white supremacists. As odd as it is to have "traitor" flags this far north of the Mason-Dix

Image: HOTLITTLEPOTATO for Wired magazine. From Schoolhouse Rock and whatever amount of civics classes have survived the regimes of high-stakes testing in our schools, many of us have gained the impression that in the United States, voters choose their politicians. If we have a more sophisticated understanding, we understand that the first draft of the Constitution disenfranchised most of the population, but that amendments expanded the franchise, first by race and then by sex. We might remain (rightfully) cynical about the manipulation of voters and by the insidious advantages of incumbency, but we think of the general direction of influence to be: voters --> politicians Frequent readers of this blog will know that I have written quite a lot about the pernicious effects of gerrymandering, a way of manipulating district boundaries to gain partisan advantage, so that the selection process is reversed: politicians --> voters I encourage those with curiosity and perhaps insomnia

Map by Neil Freeman, 2012 Click to enlarge When Neil Freeman's imaginative map of the United States was first tossed over my digital transom last week, I noticed the names of some of the larger areas. I was aware that he had divided the territory in such a way as to make them all equal in population. But I mainly noticed the names of some of the larger imagined states, such as Ogallala, and was immediately put in mind of other continent-scale efforts at regionalization , including the famous Nine Nations of North America. Although the names he applies to the map reveal a profound understanding of what geographers call sense of place, Freeman began his project with something more practical in mind: addressing a somewhat subtle aspect of voter suppression. On his presciently-named blog Fake is the New Real , he explained the iterative process by which began to define his states , and goes on to describe some of the detailed considerations. Although he insisted that the map is primari